Hybrid Cloud Gains in Popularity, Survey Finds

The hybrid model of cloud computing is gaining more popularity in the enterprise, as businesses move more workloads and applications to public cloud infrastructures and away from private deployments.

Those are some of the findings from RightScale’s annual “State of the Cloud” report, which the company released Wednesday. It’s based on interviews with 1,000 IT professionals, with 48% of them working in companies with more than 1,000 employees.

The biggest takeaway from the report is that enterprises and their IT departments are splitting their cloud dollars between public and private deployments, and creating demands for a hybrid approach.

“The 2017 State of the Cloud Survey shows that while hybrid cloud remains the preferred enterprise strategy, public cloud adoption is growing while private cloud adoption flattened and fewer companies are prioritizing building a private cloud,” according to a blog post accompanying the report. “This was a change from last year’s survey, where we saw strong gains in private cloud use.”

Specifically, 85% of respondents reported having a multi-cloud, hybrid strategy, and that’s up from the 82% who reported a similar approach in 2016. At the same time, private cloud adoption dropped from 77% in 2016 to 72% in 2017.

In the survey, 41% of respondents reported running workloads in public clouds, while 38% said they run workloads in private clouds. In large enterprises, those numbers reverse, with 32% of respondents running workloads in public clouds, and 43% running workloads within private infrastructures.

“It’s important to note that the workloads running in private cloud may include workloads running in existing virtualized environments or bare-metal environments that have been ‘cloudified,’ ” according to the report.

When it comes to adopting cloud technologies and services, there are less barriers and concerns this year compared to 2016. The lack of resources and expertise to implement a cloud strategy was still the top concern.

In addition the report notes that in every cloud expertise level the Top 5 Challenges” indicate there is a substantial concern with “managing costs”. One vehicle that can help manage costs is to apply data reduction technologies to your cloud deployment. Permabit VDO can be applied to public and/or private clouds quickly and easily enabling cost reduction of 50% or more in on-premise, in-transit and public cloud deployments.